5. Fonts and Internationalisation

Details about the font support in this version of XFree86 can be found
in the README.fonts document.

5.1. TrueType support

This version of XFree86 comes with two TrueType backends, known as
`xfsft' (the "freetype" module) and `X-TrueType' (the
"xtt" module). Both of these backends are based on the FreeType
library.

5.2. CID font support

Support for CID-keyed fonts is included in this version of XFree86.
The CID-keyed font format was designed by Adobe Systems for fonts with large character sets. The
CID-keyed font support in XFree86 was donated by SGI. See the LICENSE document for a copy of the CID Font Code Public
License.

5.3. Internationalisation of the scalable font backends

A new ``fontenc'' layer has been added to allow the scalable font backends
to use a common method of font re-encoding. This re-encoding makes it
possible to uses fonts in encodings other than their their native
encoding. This layer is used by the Type1 and Speedo backends and the
`xfsft' version of the TrueType backend. The `X-TrueType' version of
the TrueType backend uses a different re-encoding method based on loadable
encoding modules.

5.4. Large font optimisation

The glyph metrics array, which all the X clients using a particular font
have access to, is now placed in shared memory, so as to reduce redundant
memory consumption. For non-local clients, the glyph metrics array is
transmitted in a compressed format.

5.5. Unicode/ISO 10646 support

What is included:

All ``-misc-fixed-*'' BDF fonts are now available in the
ISO10646-1 encoding and cover at least the 614 characters
found in ISO 8859-{1-5,7-10,14,15}, CP1252, and MES-1. The
non-bold fonts also cover all Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4)
characters, including those found in all 8-bit MS-DOS/Windows
code pages. The 8-bit variants of the ``-misc-fixed-*'' BDF
fonts (ISO8859-1, ISO8859-2, KOI8-R, etc.) have all been
automatically generated from the new ISO10646-1 master fonts.

Some ``-misc-fixed-*'' BDF ISO10646-1 fonts now cover a
comprehensive Unicode repertoire of over 3000 characters
including all Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gregorian,
Hebrew, IPA, and APL characters, plus numerous scientific,
typographic, technical, and backwards-compatibility
symbols. Some of these fonts also cover Arabic, Ethiopian,
Thai, Han/Kanji, Hangul, full ISO 8859, and more. For the 6x13
font there is now a 12x13ja Kanji extension and for the 9x18
font there is a 18x18ja Kanji/Han/Hangul extension, which
covers all ISO-2022-JP-2 (RFC 1554) characters. The 9x18 font
can also be used to implement simple combining characters by
accent overstriking. For more information, read Markus Kuhn's
UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ.

Both the xfsft (the "freetype" module) and the X-TrueType
(the "xtt" module) TrueType font backends support
Unicode-encoded fonts.

Known problems:

Xlib does not yet fully support UTF-8 as a locale, which means that
xterm UTF-8 keyboard support is at the moment a temporary hack.

Most ISO10646-1 fonts encode no characters above U+31FF. This
avoids the inefficient allocation and transmission of a
>700 kB large XFontStruct structure, which would happen if the
(not very important) ligatures and symbols above U+f000 were
present.

ISO 10646 Level 2 combining characters are not yet supported by
xterm (will be needed for instance for Thai and IPA).

Switching between a half-width and full-width font pair (such
as 9x18 and 18x18ja) is not yet supported by xterm (will be
needed for CJK scripts).

5.6. Lucidux fonts from Bigelow and Holmes

XFree86 now includes the ``Lucidux'' family of professionally hinted
Type 1 fonts. This family consists of the fonts ``Lucidux Serif'',
``Lucidux Sans'' and ``Lucidux Mono'' in Roman and oblique variants,
and includes over 370 glyphs in each font covering among others the
glyphs needed for ISO 8859-1, 2, 3, 4, 9 and 15. Bold variants will be
included in a future release. The design and font outlines were donated
by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes from Bigelow and Holmes Inc., and
the hinting was donated by Berthold Horn and Blenda Horn from Y&Y, Inc.
For more information, please contact
design@bigelowandholmes.com
or
sales@yandy.com
, or consult Y&Y's web site.